Sand, snow, and fire – Aquarius will make it all look natural.

Aquarius, a 3ds Max plugin that can simulate fluids, sand, smoke, fire, snow, and other materials, has been released after years of development.

It has a material point method (MPM) solver, which simulates the behavior of various materials, including solids, liquids, and gases, as well as a PIC/FLIP solver. 

Presented by Makoto Chiba several years ago, Aquarius was based on AqMesher, the tech developed at the VFX studio MagicPictures, which was originally used for meshing particle caches and OpenVDB volumes.

Aquarius is node-based and GPU-accelerated via CUDA. A single license includes unlimited network fluid simulation. You can access many OpenVDB features, such as geometry/particle meshing, levelset filters, and various fluid simulations in its node editor.

Aquarius 1.0 works with 3ds Max 2018+ and requires an NVIDIA GPU and CUDA Toolkit 11.8 for GPU acceleration. A perpetual license costs $385 and includes one year of support and maintenance. If you purchased AqMesher 2 in the past year, you can upgrade for free.

There is also a free version, Aquarius 1.0 Lite, which doesn't offer GPU acceleration and and has a 100-frame simulation limit.

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